Jul-Aug 2008

Maritime Paintings of Early Australia, 1788-1900

Maritime Paintings of Early Australia, 1788-1900

The sea is integral to the life of Australians. It was especially so for immigrants and native-born Australians, during the first 150 years or so of settlement.

Shipping was their means of travel, communication, trade, commerce, defence and providing the thread of belonging to the wider universe. Yet, this book is the first to survey Australian maritime art.

Author Martin Terry and his picture researchers have assembled the broadest range of maritime paintings, with 65 colour plates and 31 monochrome illustrations, to give a fuller picture of ships and life at sea. The paintings are combined with a concise, perceptive text, which brings a greater understanding of the representations. -

The oils in the compilation are not the standard traditional portraits of ships in profile 8B formal, accurate, two dimensional and without personality. Nor are they captured against a fake, painted backdrop, which removes them from any context, and suspends them in time. They bring the past, in all its colour and glory, alive. Views of early explorers' ships are often sketched from land, the ships serenely dominating deserted bays fringed with strange vegetation and fauna .

The era of whalers is captured in the works of Leanne Hall, William Duke and Oswald Breirly. It was a relentless industry 8B all heaving sea, spray, blood, struggle, fury and danger 8B a single dramatic moment in the life and death battle between man and beast.

Early views of ships in ports concentrate on the vessels, with only a few landmarks, such as Captain Piper's naval villa on Sydney harbour. But nearing the end of the century, the land is no longer strange and foreign. Ships, docks, ferries, lighters and city seemlessly flow into the life of one another, like the smudges of smoke from their funnels.

Australians live with the sea and the land as part of their psyche. This book shows, through its organisation, illustrations and text, how, in the 19th century, an understanding of Australian maritime art is essential to a n understanding of Australia's development. It provokes an appreciation of maritime paintings and our maritime heritage, and give hours of pleasure 8B in both reading the text and admiring the paintings.

Maritime Paintings of Early Australia 1788-1900 by Martin Terry Miegunyal Press, Melbourne University Press, 1998 Hardcover Available from Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney

Maritime Paintings of Early Australia, 1788-1900

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